BAMBRA mum Rhonda Armstrong was told she wouldn’t survive heart transplant and to start saying her goodbyes when she chanced upon a radical trial procedure which gave her another look at life.

Cardiomyopathy had blown the left side of her heart out to four times the size of a regular whole heart. Her specialist at Melbourne’s The Alfred hospital described it as being like a string bag which had lost its strength.

Remarkably, injection of an Algisyl solution derived from seaweed into the heart wall has made the lifetime horsewoman well enough to tackle the trek of a lifetime.